Chapter 10: What Barbara Did Next
I expected Barbara to go quiet after everything.
She didn't.
Two days after the mediation, she called Brandon and asked if she could come to the house.
Not to see him.
To see me.
Brandon told me.
I said yes.
I wasn't sure why, except that I was tired of things being unfinished.
She arrived on a Saturday morning.
Lisa was home.
I hadn't planned for that, but I didn't send her away.
Barbara stood in the doorway with a box in her arms.
Not a large box.
The kind you'd carry a gift in, or something you'd kept on a shelf for a long time.
"I won't stay," she said.
"I just wanted to bring this."
She held the box out to me.
I took it.
"Open it later," she said.
"Or don't.
That's up to you."
She looked past me, into the hallway, where Lisa had appeared at the top of the stairs.
They looked at each other.
Barbara's face did something I hadn't seen it do before.
The composure didn't disappear exactly, but it softened, the way a held breath finally releases.
"I owe you an apology," she said.
Not to me.
To Lisa.
Lisa came down two steps.
"What I said at the wedding was wrong," Barbara said.
"You are not baggage.
You never were.
I was frightened of losing my son and I took it out on you, and that was wrong, and I'm sorry."
Lisa considered this with her characteristic seriousness.
"Why were you scared of losing him?" she asked.
Barbara blinked.
"Because I love him."
"He wasn't going anywhere," Lisa said.
"I know that now."
Lisa thought about it for another moment.
"Okay," she said.
And she went back upstairs.
Barbara looked at me.
"She's remarkable," she said quietly.
"Yes," I said.
"She is."
Barbara nodded once.
Then she left.
I carried the box to the kitchen table and opened it.
Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, was my wedding train.
The one with the suitcases sewn into it.
But Barbara had removed them — every single one — and where each had been, she had sewn something else.
Small embroidered flowers.
Eight of them.
White and yellow.
Neat and careful.
At the spot where the largest suitcase had hung, where Lisa's name had been, there was something different from the others.
A small embroidered sun.
I stood there for a long time looking at it.
Brandon came in from the garden and saw my face.
"What is it?"
I showed him.
He picked up the train carefully, turned it over, looked at each flower.
Then he set it down and looked at me.
"What do you want to do with it?" he asked.
I thought about it.
"I want to keep it," I said.
"I want to frame it.
Right there." I pointed to the wall above the hallway table, where people saw it when they walked in.
"So Lisa sees it every day."
"The flowers?"
"The whole thing.
What it was, and what it became."
Brandon looked at the wall.
May you like
Then back at me.
"I'll get a frame this afternoon," he said.
